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This will come as a relief to the bespectacled hordes who have ever spent time in an eyeglasses store futilely trying on pair after pair of glasses looking for one that fits your face. Glasses.com, a new venture from 1-800 Contacts, which in turn is a subsidiary of the big insurer Wellpoint, is set to unveil a new try-on technology in a couple of months that will let you see how dozens of pairs look on a 3-D rendering of your face. The idea works like this: You step into a photo kiosk (eventually you'll be able to do it from your iPad at home) and snap three pictures of your face--front, left and right--and then take another picture holding a 3-D barcode on your forehead so the imaging sensor gets a sense of your face's scale (e.g., the distances between your pupils, width of mouth and eyes). The output is a photorealistic 3-D rendering of your face that you can swipe from side to side. More than 2,000 pairs of specs from Glasses.com's inventory, digitally rendered, appear on your face. You can swipe through images of up to four at time, slide the specs up and down your nose, favorite ones you like, change colors, share choices with your friends, and then pick up to four the company will ship to you to try on for real at home.

Turn up the volume on this video of my 3-D avatar trying out a bunch of glasses [note to self, turn iPhone sideways next time]: